In her first column for Drinksbiz, Sarah Miller reflects on how gin has changed her life and what’s next for the juggernaut spirit...

Ten years ago, people were predicting that gin would be the next big thing, but I could never have envisaged how much it would change my life. Gin was a temptation and a distraction that has somehow – remarkably – become my main occupation, with my journey from enthusiast to expert taking place alongside, and because of, the spirit’s rise.

When I was growing up (and until very recently) there was always a bottle of Gordon’s in my parents’ drinks cabinet, but I’ll never forget my big brother introducing us to Bombay Sapphire’s iconic blue bottle in the 1990s. It was a design that marked a turning point for gin’s fortunes, even though a handful of historic brands continued to dominate the market.

It wasn’t until 2014 that my palate was properly piqued by a visit to the UK’s first “small-batch” distillery at the epicentre of the gin boom: Sipsmith.

Back then, I was a slightly bored stay-at-home mum, knowingly leaning into the “mother’s ruin” cliché by showing an uncanny knack for winning gin competitions on Twitter, making the most of brands’ efforts to get themselves heard and everyone else talking about them.

I found myself getting into the spirit at the same time that now well-established brands were finding their footing and I launched my blog, Gin A Ding Ding, in 2016 as gin sales smashed the £1billion barrier for the first time. As gin was declared the UK’s most popular spirit in 2017, I was excited (and anxious) to find myself judging what turned out to be the first of many spirits competitions (at the Bombay Sapphire Distillery no less!).

But ten years is a long time in any industry, and the last few have not been kind to this one. “2018 was the party,” says Tom Warner, who founded Warner’s Distillery in 2012. Despite sales hitting an all-time high in 2019, just 10 years after Sipsmith started production, the tide was already beginning to turn.

It started with big brands pushing distribution amid a flood of flavoured gins, but then came Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, followed swiftly by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the UK’s cost-of-living crisis and then, to cap it off, in August 2023 the single biggest alcohol duty increase in almost 50 years.

With some consumer fatigue inevitable and costs continuing to rise across the board, it’s a challenging time to be a gin producer, and headlines confirming gin’s long-term decline in the UK make worrying reading.

However, there are bright spots on the horizon. Several of the bigger gin distilleries that hit trouble have found either a buyer or investment and British gin exports have been showing signs of recovery.

Gin lovers, meanwhile, have never had it so good. The quality and variety of British gin is unrivalled, while global interest is spurring domestic production across Asia and beyond to central and southern America, where the influence of national spirits such as baijiu and cachaça and the use of native botanicals is resulting in even more exciting and unusual flavour profiles and products.

Fifteen years ago, when Sipsmith lobbied to change the law (previously, stills with a capacity of less than 1,800 litres were banned in the UK) they changed the distilling landscape irrevocably, and those ripples are still being felt around the world.

The explosion of gins globally means increasingly high standards for entry alongside demands for more innovative, original and sustainably produced spirits, making the category one to watch and relish. And one thing’s for sure: we’ll never return to a market dominated by just a handful of historic distilleries again. There’s no getting the gin genie back in that bottle.

Sarah Miller is a UK-based spirits writer, judge and consultant.
ginadingding.com